Spotlight

Managing the lifecycle

Having succeeded in various segments, UGS is now exploring newer markets such as consumer packaged goods, retail and apparel, says Atanu Kumar Das.

UGS has been in India for nearly 15 years, including as the erstwhile SDRC or Unigraphics Solutions. The company is a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, with over 3.3 million licenced seats and 42,000 clients worldwide. It promotes openness and standardisation, and collaborates with clients to create enterprise solutions that enable them to transform their processes by innovating.

Says Vivek Marwaha, Country Marketing Manager, UGS India, “We have consistently led in the Indian market in terms of absolute revenues, marketshare, customer satisfaction or the overall installed base, and we intend to strengthen our position further. Ever since the merger of SDRC and Unigraphics into this new company, our growth has accelerated.”

The company addresses the requirements of product development across the entire spectrum of discrete manufacturing industries. It is doing well particularly in segments such as automotive (both OEMs and component manufacturers), industrial machinery, aerospace & defence, shipbuilding, electronic products and appliances.

“While our primary focus continues to be in the area of discrete manufacturing, we have succeeded in addressing the PLM requirements of hitherto unexplored markets. These non-traditional markets include consumer packaged goods, retail and apparel. We plan to learn from these successful deployments, explore similar industries in India, and hopefully replicate the success we have had in these markets elsewhere in India as well,” Marwaha remarks.

Varied products

The NX product portfolio, including current products such as NX, I-deas NX series, NX Nastran, Imageware and Femap, is a set of proven CAD /CAM/CAE solutions for total product engineering, enabling companies to model and validate products and their production processes in an integrated digital environment. The NX solutions deliver a strategic advantage to manufacturers by effectively capturing, applying, and sharing knowledge throughout the digital engineering process, significantly enhancing a company’s digital decision-making.

The Teamcentre product line enables extended manufacturing enterprises to capture, manage, access, integrate and leverage diverse product information—product requirements, project data, engineering design data, parts/documents, and product configurations—in a Web-based environment. The Teamcentre suite of visualisation and collaboration solutions helps companies optimise their PLM processes by unifying their internal organisations with suppliers, business partners and customers in an environment of digital collaboration.

UGS has a record of leveraging decades of industry-specific manufacturing expertise to develop process solutions that transform the world’s leading manufacturers. It offers the Tecnomatix suite of best-in-class digital manufacturing applications and production expertise covering manufacturing engineering through shop-floor execution. These solutions are connected to legacy systems and the extended enterprise by an open manufacturing backbone.

Solid Edge is a computer aided design (CAD) product from UGS. In addition to its ability to create virtual 3D prototypes of complex products, Solid Edge is the only mainstream mechanical design system with an integrated data management capability.

Recent wins
Customer	Deployment
Maruti Udyog	Large contract for digital manufacturing solution (Tecnomatix)
Crompton Greaves	PLM (Teamcentre) implementation
Tata Motors	Expansion of Teamcentre deployment
Visvesvaraya Technical University	NX and Solid Edge deployments across various engineering colleges affiliated to the university throughout Karnataka

Reaching out

While our primary focus continues to be in the area of discrete manufacturing, we have achieved success in addressing the PLM requirements of hitherto unexplored markets Vivek Marwaha Country Marketing Manager UGS India

UGS has three offices in the country with over 50 professionals. The company also has a development centre in Pune which staffs more than 300 software professionals who are making significant contributions to the company’s product roll-outs. “The centre is developing some innovative CAD products, and we expect that this strength is going to increase substantially by the end of this fiscal,” Marwaha states.

At every office, UGS has sales and technical support personnel who address the requirements of customers in their regions and support their channels located there. Almost half of UGS’ revenue comes through its channel partners. “They provide us with the necessary reach, knowledge of local markets, and in many cases, specific domain knowledge of industries. We ensure that our channels are regularly trained and equipped to address market requirements as well as anyone in the UGS sales and support team,” Marwaha adds.

According to the company, a comprehensive portfolio of products and solutions is what keeps it ahead. It enables UGS address the various stages of PLM which helps in the digitisation of each of the stages of the product lifecycle individually. UGS has products that cover digital product development (through NX and Solid Edge), product data management, digital collaboration, visualisation and related applications (through Teamcentre), and digital manufacturing (through Tecnomatix).

UGS has thousands of customers using a few seats of its software, and also some customers using more than 10,000 seats.

In an industry that already boasts of higher-than-average maintenance renewal rates, UGS has among the highest software maintenance renewal rates.

atanu@expresscomputeronline.com